Your father’s cologne is the smell you relate to absence. At 2AM, you hear your mother scream. It is raining, and the clouds come together to form the most obliterating compartmentalization of sky, an estrangement that exhumes vacancy that classifies you – young and longing. At 2:45AM, to the intimate beatings of loss, you absolve into an internal form of anarchy. It is raining and the flowers become ballerinas in the fleeting moonlight, making love to the water – clasping the droplets as if drowning a million different deaths. At 3:00AM you hear your mother’s wails diminish. It is the last time you will ever hear her cry. You are 11.

You are 17 when you have embodied the word “love” into a 19 year old boy who folds his jeans up at the ankles and misuses the words “fuck” and “shit”, even when “kwasia” is more accurate. When he sinks into you, when your bodies tremor in unison, you will learn the difference between want and need. You may want that boy, but you will realize, subsequent to the emptiness you feel when he is no longer inside of you and at 1:00PM, that you absolutely don’t need him.

Your father’s cologne is the smell you relate to absence. It is five years later, 1AM, when the boy (or man, he claims) you met sweating profusely at a local waakye joint ten months ago says he loves you. He, who stares hungrily at other girls when he thinks you’re not looking. He, who tells you to quiet down when you’re rambling about something you’re passionate about. “Please please please, not again” he says. The stars are awake, penetrating through the blinds as if calling a seance. When he reaches for you, you think you feel heaven. The ethereal entrenchment of the night illuminating his vacant face makes you think, for a second, that you could love him too.

At 8AM you will realize that it is impossible to love him. He says he can’t do it anymore. That you are a ghost emancipating into thin air. That you are closed off, constrained, piled with too much tremor and loss and pain. He says you are hard to love. “I am hard to love.” You will bake the words into your tongue until they become the only language you know. At 10AM, to the intimate beatings of loss, over and over again, you die then live then die a million times over. At 11AM your death will signify rebirth.

Your father’s cologne is the smell you relate to absence. When you begin to dissociate it from loss, from diminishing footsteps, it will be a Friday night – 11PM. You’ll be walking out of a bar, drunk. He’ll see you, he’ll hold you, he’ll ask you if you’re okay. He’ll drive you home. When he touches you, when you sniff the cologne, you will feel the waves of longing. The first time you make love, it won’t be a confession, it will be laying out all your inadequacies knowing that they are not inadequate, but enough – knowing that you are enough. When he says he loves you, you won’t count the hours until it’s over, you won’t even count. You will stare, he’ll stare back, and you’ll tell him you love him too. When you bury your face in his chest, what you whiff is what you will relate to presence for the rest of your life.

The blare of horns is deafening. The only thing that encapsulates the burning air is the distant sound of the prayer call and the adept scrape of feet against sand. The colors are also loud, decorating the streets like a thousand drapes in a wedding hall. The colors calm the burn into a flame, the flame into a flicker and the flicker into the mutilated dreams of lives glued to a bike that does not pedal for them – but lives forever launching forth into anarchy. I try to observe the woman shuffling quickly by, the baby strapped to her back evidently helpless and malnourished. I attempt to pay attention to the smoke that has steadily exhumed out of exhaust pipes and formed a fine layer in the atmosphere. I can almost breathe. But I feel the desolation within me again, feel the beating of heart against chest that confirms that I am in the same obsolete place, a place where I am neither heralding forwards or backwards but remain a stagnant thicket of nothingness. I am dying an internal death.

The call sounds louder. My chest constricts further. Distant hearts facing the east – I feel myself emancipate into the surrounding air. It’s raining now, and I am almost so engulfed by the steady rhythm of raindrops that I don’t notice the right turn that will lead me down the road that will end in Femi’s arms. I go down this road because I need her, and she seems to be the single thing completely devoid of trepidation in my life, the single thing that allays pain. I take out my phone then, locate wifey and type “working late, see you soon love.”

Everything seems to calm. The rain has subsided into a gentle drizzle and the drops hit the tarmac in a calculated fashion. The incarceration I feel slowly transcends into freedom and my fingers fidget with the radio trying to find a suitable play. It is a long stretch of road. The distant stars are exhuming a subtlety, an ethereal shine that is everything and nothing all at once. There is a faint glow in the distance. The glow is visibly a blinking light when I am finally parked a close distance from Femi’s house. I notice that they are police lights, lights that move unsteadily like the silhouette of uneasy lovers. I get out of the car. The lawn is littered with people I have never seen. I start to rush towards the door and bump into an odd looking man. He looks exasperated, “ah, you no hear? Somebody die. Relax.”

I see my wife, in that split fraction of time, being escorted out of the house. I stare at her. She stares back. When she smiles, I know Femi is dead.

quell me into a nonexistence in line
with the waves awash a dream
awash a hope
awash the impending,
eminent obstruction of self
that my body is diminishing into –
subdue me into thinking
that we’ll stay afloat these waters
afloat the brisk moonlight of impending day.
we’ll bask in this rue,
our chests magnificently heaving
in the escaping sunset. i
mutter a prayer, count to ten,
close my eyes, breathe you in,
feel you in, want you in
a thousand thoughts escaping,
vaporizing into nothingness at the loss of you.
the shore comes into view –
there’s the rim of the sun clouding my eyes,
there’s sand transpiring into a softness that isn’t you
there’s me walking back into the ocean
calmed by the proclamation that
i’d rather drown a thousand times over
than lose you.

–i wanted to write something that reminded me of the ocean and it felt like I was being encapsulated by it the entire time. This is bliss.

I’m drowning
and these waters are too shallow for retribution.
Wish I wasn’t subduing into nothingness
but I’m quelling into a more abstract form –
an indelible sense of self
that on most days, doesn’t seem to exist.

These skies are too lustful
for insignificance,
these waters glimmer
with the craving sun.
The liquid is cool against my skin
and the clouds contrast with the heavens
in the most endearing seance.

You’re there too – beautiful.
The moon bathes us in a light
that I think depict your eyes,
and I find that I’m fading into this incongruous disguise of self.

He asks me if I know myself
I think that self
is constantly undergoing a metamorphosis and thus,
can never be truly understood.
I say yes,
because I find that ignorance can be survived by more ignorance
but never by the active consciousness of self.
I find that I cannot convey
the intricacies of my mind
into an intricacy that craves the understanding of others.

And so, I think everyone else needs saving,
not me.

but I’d rather leave this place than stay,
because these waters are calmer
than anything I have ever known.

There is a breaking of self as the trotro rolls carelessly down the road. There is dormancy. And, when I think the calm is finally approaching, a reawakening. There are the mellow tunes of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” lubricating my vacant soul.

It is well past midday and the clouds have formed a fine layer across the skies so much that the sun is nothing but a faint glow. I am so entranced by this that I think I see heaven. I continue to gaze and a million things begin to materialize as a cry erupts and shifts my attention to the woman beside me, who has ferociously lifted her right breast from the confines of her dress and inserted it into her baby’s mouth. She catches me looking and the moment is so jittery that I have to speedily shift my eyes back to the cake of nothingness in the skies above.

Ironically, Marley’s voice drives me deeper into myself and does everything else but propagate freedom. I feel confined and, when I get off and my feet connect with the red sand, my legs almost buckle under my internal weight. I feel a breaking and entering and then, I see her –beautiful and endearing in a way that only she can manage. She’s walking away, and there isn’t enough sanity left in me to run after her.

That is, until I get to her street and notice the black and red draped around her house like a confession. Until I hear the crying and wailing and I feel myself emancipate into the surrounding air as I close the gate behind me. Until I see her mother roll around the ground in frenzy, wails escaping her estranged mouth. Until I notice her father in the corner, head clinging to hands. Until everything slows and eventually, stops. And there is a fire awakening in me I am certain will never calm.

It is well past midday and the clouds have formed a fine layer across the skies so much that the sun is nothing but a faint glow. I am emancipating from myself and there are a thousand places I’d rather be, every instance beginning and ending with her. I feel my knees on the ground. I feel a breaking and an entering and then, I see her –

midnight. She’s crying. She’s telling me she’s pregnant. I’m telling her it’s not mine. I’m asking her to please leave. She’s walking away, and there isn’t enough sanity left in me to run after her.

It is a subtle day in July. I am sitting at a recently used table on the side of a dusty street that stinks of unfinished beer, mostly because the mediocrely-dressed servers do not bother to wipe the tables down wholeheartedly. Instead, they do so in slow, lackadaisical movements. I would try to signal at one of them, but the sun is blinding my eyes so much that I can see only tiny specks of black dots when I try to look up. But really, I’m focused on the words that are jumping about on the page in-front of me, the philosophical manacles of Francis Bacon enslaving my mind.

I think my thoughts have discombobulated their way into the inferno of surreality and I almost get eternally lost in this until I look up, ignore the sun and notice the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Not beautiful in the way that catches your eye for a second, and then your brain processes it and you forget, but beautiful in a proceed that completely smacks the breath out of you and excommunicates your sanity. She notices me staring because there is a sudden awkwardness that fills the air and she’s smiling now and I think I suddenly understand the concept of love at first sight.

I get up from my seat, walk towards her and tell her that she is the most beautiful human being I have ever laid eyes on. She shrugs, as though this is something she hears on an hourly basis, and gestures for me to take a seat next to her. And as she speaks, I find that beauty is completely assaulted by intelligence because I am more in love with her thoughts than I am with her face. And it is only after she has spoken for a good amount of time that I realize I left my wallet on the previous table. Glancing nervously there, I notice that it rests reluctantly with amateurish abandon and I excuse myself, pick it up and return to my seat, only to be engaged in yet alone more conversation.

We speak for minutes on end and I ask her what she is doing alone at this chop-bar. She hesitates, as though the answer is quite obvious, and ascertains that she is waiting for her boyfriend. There is silence. There is more silence as I fidget with my fingernails. I groan inwardly, mostly because I have single-handedly managed to find the love of my life at one of the oldest spots in Accra. Fela tells me in incongruous pidgin about her sugar-daddy/boyfriend (she uses the words interchangeably) who buys her all the latest clothes, funds her university education and best of all, keeps it a saucy secret from his wife and children. I think that this cannot possibly get any more cliché. She goes on and on about the affair they’ve been having for months, getting too detailed about how sexually dissatisfying he is.

I would have left a long while ago but I like watching her speak, something about the way her mouth moves is awkwardly satisfying. I groan inwardly again because she’s gesturing that her boyfriend/sugar-daddy is walking towards us. She urges me to look up. I look up.

At first, I am sure I cannot believe my eyes and then I am certain that my eyes cannot possibly be lying. Confusion. His smile drops. And, when she shrieks “babe, come meet my new friend!” my father collapses.

I didn’t specify the gender of the main character mostly in homage to the person who inspired my college essay. They could be female. They could be male. They could be whatever you want them to be. I’m heterosexual so I wrote this from a guy’s perspective, honestly. I tried the abrupt ending, sudden realization type thing. I’ll get better.

And then, I will fish you out from within the stars,
behind the effervescent evening clouds,
search for you where the disjointed constellations
converge to become
a significant
dilemma of truth,
compounded with anguish,
filled with the starkness
of patiently longing:
mon amour, je vais chercher vous

dans mon âme.
There are a thousand callings,
but my crooked heart
will malignantly find
its way
back
to
you.

2.

When gravity failed
and my feet became not my feet
but yours
and my hands became not my hands
but yours
when I mistook trepidation for in-signification
Je savais que j’étais parti.
When my eyes,
despondent with longing,
found your eyes,
Je savais que j’étais fini.

We will waltz in outer space,
to an ulterior motive that isn’t ours,
but not for long.
When the sun comes out
and the flowers shy up their petals
and the rays kiss them open
I’ll show you that I deserved to be loved

more than flowers ever did,
there’s only so much truth left
within these walls,
only so much air
for my infinite breathing –
becoming slowly, poignantly finite
when I’m with you.